Timothy Jones

Timothy Jones is something of a legend on the newsgroups, but for
all the wrong reasons (see the Timothy
Jones FAQ). He likes to appeal to the authority of his unnamed
"physics prof" whenever he is challenged, and he is famous for
the patented Timsult™ debate tactic (a polite insult, ie-
carefully worded mockery, condescension, and contempt), which is designed
to goad the other party into a conventional insult, at which point he
tries to portray himself as a "wounded innocent" and change
the subject to his opponent's bad manners (see the aforementioned FAQ).
And of course, he is infamous for once saying that "watts and joules
are interchangeable." He (or someone or something claiming to be
him) recently re-appeared on the newsgroups after a long hiatus. Numerous
fakers have pretended to be him over the years so there was some cause
for skepticism, however he remained perfectly in character throughout
our entire exchange, which is highly unusual for one who's just
doing it as a joke. Aron Kerkhof (author of the FAQ) agreed that if this
wasn't Tim, then it was an incredibly disciplined facsimile. His argument
was very simplistic, and can be summed up as:

"An ISD was destroyed by an asteroid in TESB, and
we've never seen an ISD destroyed by a single turbolaser blast, so a
turbolaser blast has less energy than a TESB asteroid".

That in itself is nothing new (I've heard that argument many, many
times before), but watch how he goes to work on it, expanding and
decorating it until it somehow balloons from a single sentence to a
bloated mini-essay, complete with a blatantly obvious attempt to
boost his own credibility by blathering on about Occam's Razor. Also
notice the tremendous effort he makes to seem reasonable and
well-informed. I was warned that Timothy Jones was a master of sophistry,
and that his arguments are invariably 100% style, 0% substance. Perhaps
one could call this admonition "poisoning the well", but I
challenge you to read the following E-mail and not come to the
same conclusion:

April 15, 2002:

Name: TJE-Mail: gadfly_@hotmail.com

Comments:
Hi. I've browsed at some of what's written here. It's well thought
out. But it seems to me it's missing a fundamental point that,
unfortunately for the SW propoenets in technological debates,
undermines its entire project.

The fact that the ISD in ESB
has to shoot down those asteroids at all in the first place, as I've
often had to point out, indicates very weak (compared to Trek
starships anyway) weapons, albeit indirectly.

Why? Because,
*if* the weapons were as powerfull on an ISD as this site argues for,
and *if* the ISD is yet vulnerable to the much lower threat energies
from colliding with those small rocks (which are *also* calculable,
though I notice the conspicuous absence of such calculations from
this site), then we are faced with the unavoidable logical
implication that the ISDs must therefore have very weak shields and
hulls. Otherwise, they wouldn't need to destroy those small rocks.
Since they do, though, this would therefore *also* mean that their
weapons, including their turbolaser weapons simply cannot be as
powerfull as has been argued for here on this site as well as on the
newsgroup debate threads, in which I have long taken part.

This
is because of the conflict created by the duel premises of powerfull
weapons and weak shields and hulls. The arguments of this site and
threads on newsgroups like ASVS try to establish the first premise.
But the visuals from ESB that such arguments rely on, ironically,
clearly imply the second premise. Since we cannot reject this second
premise, the first one is jeopardised by the its conflict with the
second. If we refuse to abandon the first premise, the only other way
to resolve said conflict is to say the ISDs must have weak hulls and
shields. Otherwise, since lesser energies from low speed impacts with
small rocks are so devastating (as ESB visuals clearly show),
obviously the supposedly greater energies from turbolaser bolts would
destroy capital ships in just one or two hits, or at least cripple
them, by smashing whatever part they contact.

However, not
only would this choice be unwise for the SW proponents, it would in
fact be in conflict with the overall preponderance of the visual
evidence from the SW films. Simply put, turbolasers do *not* disable
or destroy capital ships such as corvetts or other ISDs in just one
or a few hits. So we actually *cannot* take that we out of the
dilemma, even if we wanted to. Therefore, the first option becomes
logically unavoidable. Turbolasers *cannot* be and simply are not as
powerfull as has been asserted on this site and in the newsgroup
discussion threads, all calculations and "observations"
(well thought out though they are) notwithstanding.

There must
then be some flaw in either the observations that the SW proponents
have made, or else in the calculation they have made based on them.
Given the verifiability of the calculations themselves, I doubt this
second area is where the flaw rests. And indeed, it would seem more
plausable to suppose that it is the basic observations and resultant
assumptions that are in error. This means that, *something* that the
SW proponents take themselves to have seen, simply is not so.

It
is my contention that, as has occured before (and therefore can be
argued from a basis of precident), George Lucas and/or his special
effects people simply took too much cinematic liscense with the
visual production of the scene being refered to. In other words,
those rocks were *not*, in fact vaporized, but merely blown apart,
and at slow enough speeds so as *not* to render said fragmentation "a
moot point." The special effects crew simply didn't bother to
draw in the rock fragments (which would've been just dust particles
and pebbles and such), because they didn't want to take the time over
what they considered to be a minor detail. Or they may have thought
(correctly I would think) that such would not be visible againt the
pitch black backdrop of space. In other words, they goofed. It would
be no different than when Han Solo spoke to Luke and Ben about having
"...made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs," refering
to a parsec as a unit of time, when it's actually a unit of
distance.

The Rule Of Parsimony, or Rule Of Simplicity (A.K.A.
"Occam's Razor,") says that one should take the simplest
explanation to be the best one, pending further input. Here, our
choices are to deal with the conflict between the dualistic
implications from the same scene in ESB, namely, that ISDs definitely
have comparatively weak hulls and shields (that is, compared to Trek
ships, whose navagational defelctors easily protect them from such
small objects at such slow contact speeds, and even at high warp) and
yet *supposedly* have such powerfull weapons, that we would then
expect to see one-hit kills/neutralizations of capital ships -- which
we never do -- or the choice of interpreting the asteroid destruction
visuals in ESB with a bit of leeway for the fact that those who
created them were not as scientifically astute as those who've since
tried to hold them up as evidence of weapons power. Occam's Razor
clearly directs us, in this case, to the latter choice. Therefore,
that is my conclusion.

The clearly shown weakness of SW ship
shields and hulls (compared to Trek ships' shields and hulls)
prevents arguing for SW ship weapons power levels that are close to
or beyond that of the lesser threats (such as small asteroids) which
we've seen do greater damage than said SW ship weapons. Ergo, they
are substantially less powerfull than have been argued for by the SW
proponents based on ESB visuals, said visuals therefore being less
well thought out than they should have been, based on the overall
preponderance of evidence (both visual and spoken dialogue) of their
performance. Thank you.

Whew! Did you catch all of that? Amazing what you can do with a
simple one-horse argument, a whole ton of sophistry, and a blatantly
obvious attempt to misappropriate Occam's Razor, eh? Well, if you've
figured out anything about my personality by now, you should know
that I hate bullshitters, and ladies and gentlemen, this guy is a
first-class bullshitter. I'm also the kind of guy who respects honesty
before superficial manners, and this guy's artificially polite manner
(well-mannered, but it's obvious he didn't even bother to read the
relevant portions of my site) rubs me the wrong way right off the bat.
I might have ignored him, but people have been telling me for years
that they'd like to see Timmy Jones on my trophy wall, so I thought
"aw, what the hell" and decided to give him the usual
body-slam.